Federal judges don’t usually ask the government to prove itself. For most of American legal history, they didn’t need to. When a Department of Justice attorney stood before a court and made a statement, that statement carried a kind of institutional weight – the word of the United States government, delivered by lawyers who understood their ethical obligations ran to the court as much as to their client. That assumption held through administrations of both parties, through wars, political scandals, and constitutional crises. It has not held through this one.
Over the past eighteen months, something has shifted in federal courtrooms across the country. Judges in Virginia, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Florida, Manhattan, and Washington, D.C., have stopped treating the Justice Department’s representations as a reliable baseline. They are demanding paperwork. They are ordering preservation of internal communications. They are referring DOJ attorneys for disciplinary proceedings. Some are raising the possibility of contempt. The unwritten compact between the courts and the executive branch’s lawyers, that the government says what it means and means what it says, is under active pressure in ways that legal observers say have no recent precedent.
The most visible flashpoint right now involves a $1.776 billion fund, Trump legal documents, and a Virginia federal judge who is not satisfied with words.
The Anti-Weaponization Fund and Judge Brinkema’s Demand
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, sitting in the Eastern District of Virginia, extended her block on the Trump administration’s nearly $1.8 billion compensation fund in mid-June 2026, while simultaneously requesting that the Department of Justice submit a sworn declaration indicating it was not moving forward with the fund, signed by both the acting attorney general and the Treasury secretary.
The fund itself was controversial from the moment it was announced. The Justice Department set up the $1.776 billion fund, overseen by a five-member commission, to dole out payments to those who could show they were victims of “lawfare” and “weaponization,” terms Trump and his allies have used to describe investigations and criminal cases against them. The roughly 1,500 January 6 rioters Trump pardoned upon his return to the White House in 2025 are among those most likely to profit from the fund, which Trump’s DOJ established as part of a settlement stemming from the president’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had told Congress that the fund was not moving ahead, but Judge Brinkema said the Justice Department would have a week to confirm that assertion with a sworn statement if it wanted to halt her injunction. The judge’s reasoning was straightforward. Brinkema expressed concern over Trump’s own public comments and Blanche’s refusal to commit to rescinding the fund in writing, noting that the president’s statements “carry a lot of weight” and represent “a pretty good indicator that there will be some incentive or motive to make it happen.”
Blanche had already refused to make that commitment in writing when asked to do so by Democratic lawmakers, and Trump repeatedly expressed his support for the concept of the fund, prompting questions about whether the administration was actually abandoning it.
The Refusal to File
On the deadline date, the Trump administration declined to submit the court declaration from Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, calling the judge’s demand “unnecessary.” In a notice to the federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, senior Justice Department lawyers rebuffed Brinkema’s request for the declaration from Blanche, Bessent, and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward.
The DOJ’s stated objection was constitutional in nature. Senior counsel Andrew Block wrote in a filing that “such declarations are unnecessary and the compelled testimony of senior officials from the Executive Branch implicates serious separation of powers concerns.” The administration’s position, in essence, was that its oral statements to Congress and its representations in open court should be sufficient for the judge’s purposes, and that requiring more crossed a line into executive branch territory where courts have no business operating.
Brinkema had said the week before that, “to avoid any further litigation,” the senior officials should file the declaration under penalty of perjury that the anti-weaponization program wouldn’t proceed “in any manner, or under any name.” The administration’s refusal to commit to that standard, specifically to say so under oath and in writing, left the injunction in place and the litigation ongoing.
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a nonpartisan national legal organization that promotes democracy through litigation and policy work, which represents the plaintiffs, said in a statement that it was “telling that even after the federal court gave them a week, the Acting Attorney General and other senior administration officials continue to refuse to say under oath that the Slush Fund is dead and won’t operate in the future.” The significance of that observation extends well beyond this single case.
A Pattern Courts Have Now Documented
Federal judges across the country have adopted a posture of formal skepticism toward a Justice Department they no longer trust to self-correct, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes with open frustration.
Stacey Young, a founder and executive director of Justice Connection, an 18-year DOJ veteran who served as a Senior Attorney across both the Civil Division and the Civil Rights Division under five presidential administrations, put it plainly: “It’s just extraordinarily unusual to see these kinds of corrections and misrepresentations coming from DOJ.” The presumption of regularity that courts have historically extended to government lawyers, she said, has been replaced with “profound skepticism.”
Legal observers have noted that judges have caught DOJ officials withholding information or making demonstrably false statements to federal courts. “That hasn’t happened in the federal courts for years,” one analyst observed. “It was sort of an accepted thing that just the justice department would not want to lie to judges just because it would slow down so many of their cases. But the second Trump administration has done this repeatedly.”
The geographic spread is striking. Cases in Rhode Island, Florida, Minnesota, Manhattan, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., have each produced their own documentation of the problem. The pattern of judicial pushback has moved from isolated incidents to something more systemic.
Rhode Island: Two Judges, Two Separate Findings
In Rhode Island, Judge Melissa DuBose discovered that the government had never apprised her of a detainee’s “dangerousness and/or criminal history” in an immigration case, information the government possessed but withheld. She directed the Justice Department to explain why it should not be held in contempt.
The DOJ lawyer involved, Kevin Bolan, acknowledged in his response that he knew, prior to DuBose’s release order, that the detainee had an outstanding 2023 arrest warrant, but said unnamed ICE officials had told him he “was not permitted to disclose that information” to the judge for an unspecified “legitimate law enforcement reason.” DuBose referred Bolan, the chief of the civil division of Rhode Island’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, for disciplinary proceedings for his “lack of candor.”
A separate case brought in a different Rhode Island courtroom produced a nearly identical finding. U.S. District Court Judge Mary McElroy, a Trump nominee from his first term, referred DOJ attorneys for discipline after quashing a federal subpoena, having found that DOJ lawyers misrepresented and withheld information from courts to force Rhode Island Hospital to comply with the subpoena.
McElroy concluded that the DOJ had “proven unworthy of [the Court’s] trust at every point in this case.” The department, according to McElroy, not only “misrepresented and withheld” information from her, but then did the same in a Texas federal court where it sought to enforce the subpoena. Specifically, the DOJ led the Texas court to believe the hospital was unresponsive and uncooperative, when in fact it was the DOJ that had failed to communicate with the hospital for months. To convince the Texas court it had jurisdiction over a subpoena to a Rhode Island hospital, the DOJ claimed the investigation was being led by its Northern Texas office, even though almost all the lawyers involved worked in the department’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.
McElroy described the DOJ’s conduct as “reckless disregard for the duty of candor owed to a federal court.”
Minnesota: Nearly 100 Court Order Violations in a Single Month
Patrick Schiltz, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Minnesota, accused ICE of violating court orders nearly 100 times in the month of January 2026 alone, saying the agency “has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”
In one case, an ICE lawyer detailed to help the Justice Department with immigration petitions, responding to a judge’s frustration, said during a hearing: “The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.” She then invited the judge to hold her in contempt “so that I can have a full 24 hours sleep.”
The presiding judge said she expected Justice Department attorneys to show “100% compliance” going forward, and flatly rejected the DOJ’s argument that understaffing was a mitigating factor: “The government’s understaffing and high caseload is a problem of its own making and absolutely does not justify flagrant disobedience of court orders.”
Florida: Arguments That “Beggars Belief”
A similarly pointed ruling came out of Florida, where U.S. District Judge Roy Dalton ordered the government lawyers involved to explain why they shouldn’t be sanctioned, in a case stemming from the detention of a high school student, Javier Gimenez Rivero, who had been living in Florida with his family.
In his ruling, Judge Dalton said the government’s argument that he didn’t have jurisdiction to hear the petition “beggars belief and appears to deliberately mislead the Court about the law and the record,” calling the government’s merits position “similarly ill-informed,” “incoherent,” and “simply insupportable on all fronts.” The judge concluded that “members of this Bar have a duty of candor to the Court” and that the government’s conduct “does not meet that standard.”
The Whistleblower Who Put It on the Record
Sworn testimony from inside the department itself reinforced what individual courtrooms were already logging. Erez Reuveni, a 15-year DOJ veteran with a distinguished bipartisan record, was terminated after refusing to comply with directives he believed violated court orders and ethical obligations as an attorney. His whistleblower disclosure, submitted to Congress, the DOJ Office of Inspector General, and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, details allegations of misconduct, abuse of authority, and unlawful retaliation by senior DOJ and White House officials, including in cases where DOJ leadership allegedly ignored or circumvented court orders.
Reuveni’s attorneys described in his complaint a meeting with Justice Department officials about contesting possible court orders blocking deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. He alleged that Emil Bove, who at the time was principal assistant deputy attorney general, said that the department “would need to consider telling the courts ‘f* you’ and ignore any such court order,” and that the deportation “planes needed to take off no matter what.” Those in the room, according to the complaint, were “stunned” by the suggestion.
Reuveni had acknowledged in a court hearing that deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was an error. He was then fired. He later told the Senate Judiciary Committee that senior DOJ leadership had purposely deceived the courts and expected career staff to do the same, or else.
David Sklansky, a Stanford University law professor, said that the actions taken against Reuveni “create the strong impression that the DOJ is insisting that its lawyers violate their ethical obligations of candor.” Sklansky noted that “all lawyers have ethical obligations to be honest and forthright in their representations to the courts, and this obligation has always been understood to be particularly important for lawyers representing the government.”
The Structural Problem Behind the Pattern
Part of what is driving the breakdown in court is the collapse of the department’s institutional capacity. The Justice Department lost approximately a quarter of its attorneys in 2025, including hundreds in leadership positions, according to a report analyzing Office of Personnel Management data shared by Justice Connection.
Some Justice Department lawyers have taken the unusual step of publicly noting the strain by asking judges to extend deadlines. In at least one Massachusetts case, a judge is deciding whether to let the DOJ “correct” the record in an immigration case by adding documents that weren’t originally included, with a DHS official filing a declaration blaming the omissions on “haste” in collecting information.
The cultural pressure compounds the staffing problem. Some lawyers are wary of pressing agency officials about the accuracy of information they receive because of a February 2025 memo from then-Attorney General Pam Bondi directing them to “vigorously” defend Trump’s policies and referring to them as “his” counsel, according to a former Justice Department attorney who requested anonymity. That framing, the DOJ as the president’s personal legal team rather than as the government’s representative, goes some way toward explaining why individual attorneys may find themselves in court defending positions they cannot verify.
The scale of judicial resistance to the administration has been documented comprehensively. According to Just Security’s litigation tracker, government actions have been blocked or temporarily blocked in a combined 207 rulings as of mid-June 2026, compared to 133 total government wins, with 377 cases still awaiting rulings.
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What the Written Record Requirement Actually Means
When a federal judge demands a sworn declaration, under penalty of perjury, instead of accepting oral testimony or congressional statements, she is doing something specific. She is imposing a formal cost on the act of lying. Perjury carries criminal penalties. A sworn false statement in a court filing is not just a political embarrassment; it is a federal crime. The demand for written Trump legal documents, in this context, is less about bureaucratic procedure and more about creating a record that has genuine legal consequences if it is false.
Legal analyst Lisa Rubin explained the dynamic: the administration’s position is that judges should “trust all of the representations that they’ve made so far,” including Blanche’s congressional testimony, court filings, and twice saying so in open court. But if the administration were to put in a sworn declaration that it is not going to pursue the fund, she noted, it would expose senior officials to judicially imposed penalties, including potential criminal contempt, if that declaration turned out to be false.
That is precisely why the sworn declaration is the sticking point. The demand is not merely symbolic. It transforms a political statement into a legal commitment with enforceable consequences, which is, apparently, exactly what the administration wants to avoid.
Thirty-five former federal judges have separately argued that Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS should be reopened so the court that oversaw it can investigate “whether a fraud occurred,” writing directly that “the Court was deceived.” When retired judges file court papers arguing that a sitting administration may have deceived the judiciary, not a political opponent, not a media organization, but a court, the institutional rupture is no longer a matter of editorial opinion.
The Quiet Part, Out Loud
For decades, the relationship between the Justice Department and the federal judiciary operated on a form of professional trust that required almost no maintenance. DOJ lawyers corrected errors quickly. They disclosed information that cut against their position when required to do so. They understood that the department’s credibility, accumulated over generations and across administrations, was its most durable asset in court. One retired judge, now a member of the Article III Coalition, a network of retired U.S. judges formed last year to speak about the separation of powers and the importance of an independent judiciary, described it as “rare” in his decades on the bench to see the Justice Department come back with substantive corrections of what they had presented.
That credibility is now a variable, not a constant. Judges are logging violations, ordering ethics reviews, referring attorneys to disciplinary bodies, and, as in the Brinkema case, demanding that the most senior officials in the department put their commitments in writing and sign them under oath. This is not the posture of a court that trusts what it is being told.
As one analyst put it: “It’s an amazing moment to have judges so openly being distrustful of a justice department.”
The observation is worth sitting with, not for its tone but for its implied baseline. For it to be “amazing,” it has to be genuinely unusual, a departure from a norm so stable that most people in the legal system never had to think about it. The norm was that the government tells courts the truth. Courts can no longer assume it does, and they are building a new procedural infrastructure around that assumption. The demand for sworn declarations is not bureaucratic friction. It is the federal judiciary adapting, in real time, to a Department of Justice it has formally decided it cannot take at its word.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.